Opportunity

It is best practice to store collaborative content in a Shared Drive instead of your My Drive because content stored in a Shared Drive will not be deleted when the My Drive account holder who created the content leaves campus (e.g. is no longer an employee or student).

How to move single files from My Drive/Shared with Me to a Shared Drive

Overview - Before you begin

• Ensure you have Contributor access or above for the Shared Drive into which you will move the content.

• You can move files for which you are the owner or an editor.

• You can move the files stored in your My Drive or your Shared With Me.

• When you move a file into a Shared Drive the ownership changes to the department/unit/team who owns the Shared Drive. You will see a popup that says, "Ownership will transfer from you to UC Berkeley." 

Moving the files

1. Select the file(s) you want to move, then move them using one of the following methods:

   1. Drag and drop onto the Shared Drive (or a sub-folder) visible in the left side folder menu. 

   2. Use the Folder option visible at the top of the file list.

   3. Choose the Move option accessible from the File menu and from the 3 dots visible at the right side of the file name.

Drag and Drop the file you want to move to a Shared Drive listed in the left side menu

Troubleshooting

• If you try to move many files at once, the move can fail. Therefore move in groups of a dozen or less. (Note that a dozen is a guideline, not a hard and fast requirement.)

• See Google’s general help document, Move your organization's content to shared drives and error troubleshooting document.

How to move folders from My Drive/Shared with Me to a Shared Drive

Overview - Before you begin

• Ensure you are a Manager of the Shared Drive.

• Ensure the folder content does not include content owned by an account outside of berkeley.edu or the entire move might fail.

  • If the folder does include content owned by an account outside of berkeley.edu, first create a replacement folder in the destination Shared Drive and then select only files owned by a berkeley.edu account.

Moving the Folder

1. Select the folder you want to move and use the steps described above for moving files.

   1. Do not attempt to move more than one folder at a time. 

   2. If the folder contains a large amount of files, the move might fail. In that case, first create a replacement folder in the destination Shared Drive and then select files in batches.

Troubleshooting and Exceptions

• See Google’s general help document, Move your organization's content to shared drives and error troubleshooting document.

• Moving Google Forms to a Shared Drive: The upload file feature for Forms is not available in Shared Drives. This type of publicly accessible Form should remain in your SPA's berkeley.edu My Drive. You can then add a shortcut to this Folder in the Shared drive. Alternatively, consider using campus' Qualtrics survey service which accepts file uploads: https://technology.berkeley.edu/services/qualtrics.

Moving Permissions Differences between a My Drive and a Shared Drive

It is important to understand how permissions compare between a My Drive and a Shared Drive and what happens when you move content from one to the other.